Sézanne is a small market town in the Marne department of northeastern France, and like dozens of similar municipalities in the early 1920s, it issued its own emergency small change to address the chronic shortage of circulating bronze coinage that persisted well after the Armistice. The French state had suspended bronze centimes production during the war, and the vacuum was never adequately filled by Paris before communes took matters into their own hands.
The aluminium composition places this firmly in the later wave of such issues — most earlier commune tokens used cardboard or zinc.
Sézanne is a small market town in the Marne department of northeastern France, and like dozens of similar municipalities in the early 1920s, it issued its own emergency small change to address the chronic shortage of circulating bronze coinage that persisted well after the Armistice. The French state had suspended bronze centimes production during the war, and the vacuum was never adequately filled by Paris before communes took matters into their own hands.
The aluminium composition places this firmly in the later wave of such issues — most earlier commune tokens used cardboard or zinc.